Henry Taylor is a painter known for his intimate depictions of people, capturing a wide range of subjects that span from his close friends and family, to strangers whose appearances strike him, to celebrities within the African American community. His color-blocked compositions evoke compassion and a sense of shared space, setting the viewer in close conversation with those pictured.

For the High Line, Taylor presents a new version of a self-portrait adapted specifically for its setting on the side of a building at West 22nd Street. The work depicts the artist and a friend “blissed out,” relaxing in a swimming pool at a friend’s house in Palm Springs. Reminiscent of David Hockney’s paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools from the 1960s, the floaters, a title which references the eponymous Detroit R&B group, portrays the artist in a moment of pure, leisurely happiness.

From November 2 through December 22, the Washburn Gallery will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Hassel Smith done between 1959 to 1962 when Hassel Smith exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The only New York show of Smith’s works was held in 1961 at the Andre Emmerich Gallery although he exhibited widely throughout his life in this country and Europe.

Hassel Smith is a San Francisco “Bay Area” artist whose work in the late 50s and early 60s was strongly influenced by Clifford Still who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s. The Hassel Smith exhibition will include seven large works by the artist. A brochure will accompany the show with an introduction by Irving Blum. The following is an excerpt:

“During the run of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (1957-1968) we had three exhibitions of work by Hassel Smith…Although he began as a figurative artist he turned early to abstraction. I thought the work to be brilliant. Abstract, but often including a scent of the West, a part of the country that he loved. Hassel continues to be largely unknown due to his decision to live and work in Northern California. The seat of major radical art activity was, of course, New York. I am certain had he worked in New York then the work would be cherished and celebrated.”

Hassel Smith was born in Sturgis, Michigan in 1915 and died in Somerset, England in 2017. A major book, Hassel Smith, Paintings from 1937 – 1987, was published by Prestel in 2012 with over 150 reproductions, essays and chronology.

Gregory Van Maanen has been reborn many times in this lifetime. Each time presented itself as a transition into another kind of life. Each time pushed him into his unique art more deeply.

The first and most significant rebirth was his war experience in Vietnam in which he was seriously wounded. Essentially, he rose above the tragic and bloody tunnels and battlefield. In his own words he was sent back to earth, having been told by a Voice that it was not his time yet, and to continue with his life. He was still a teenager.

This near death experience became his muse. He arrived back in the United States, became a pacifist, and began making art. He took advantage of the free GI Bill program, which landed him in Mexico for a while. Through his art-making he struggled to avoid the terrible post-war traumas so many of his fellow vets were going through. His work became a journal of his forgiveness of war’s demonic violence and energies.

War takes one beneath the veneer of civilizations’ shallow politesse. Van Maanen was opened to universal worlds of spirits, raw emotions and the harsh realities of the Natural world.

He moved to Paterson, New Jersey where he lived hermetically, filling his studio with hundreds of fierce and beautiful sculptures and paintings. His studio became a cave in the concrete jungle.

In the mid-1980’s Cavin-Morris Gallery began to represent Gregory Van Maanen. For us he broke the existing canon of what was then known as 20th Century Folk Art. He was no folk artist nor was he part of the artworld’s mainstream. His work took us further into the idea of Art Brut, and the use of art as a pure unfettered vehicle of transcendence. It was feral.

In 2007 Kohler Foundation purchased his entire studio as an urban indoor environmental site. The studio was then gifted to John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, WI, which is known for its focus on artist-built environments. Van Maanen moved to Rochester with his partner, June Avignone, and tried to get his bearings in an entirely new physical situation and community. The basement of his house became his new studio. After a year or so it began to feel like his cave again and he continued to freely push those visions forward.

This exhibition, the first since his move to Rochester, is yet another rebirth. His paintings pursue an alternative plane of existence. He is an artist for whom everything has meaning and portent, a true animist. With his art he holds the darker side at bay, and feeds his amuletic stories to the process of light and life. The variety of imagery he is able to invoke in his tight personal vocabulary speak to every world culture.

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of prints and related unique works by abstract painter Leon Polk Smith. Polk Smith (1906-1996) holds a unique place in the distinguished tradition of American Geometric Abstract painting (together with such artists as Burgoyne Diller, Fritz Glarner, Al Held, and Ellsworth Kelly). Polk Smith's printmaking activity, begun in 1965, additionally resulted in close to 70 distinct images, characterized by buoyant forms floating on solid backgrounds with a vibrant and high-contrast color palette. These explorations of non-objective imagery put Polk Smith at the forefront of such art historical movements as Color Field, Minimalist, and Hard Edge painting.

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery will present a selection of early color lithographs dating from 1968 that Polk Smith created at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles; large-format screenprints from 1987 printed at Edition Domberger, Stuttgart; and rare, self-published silkscreens on metal from 1962. A small selection of related drawings will also be on view.

Polk Smith's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the National Gallery of Art, among others. In 1995, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a retrospective of the artist's work, Leon Polk Smith: American Painter. Earlier in 2017, Lisson Gallery organized an exhibition of Leon Polk Smith's shaped, multi-part “Constellation” series of paintings from the late 1960s and 70s, and an exhibition of drawings, Geometry in Motion: Leon Polk Smith Works on Paper, is currently on view at the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York through December 3, 2017.

Senior & Shopmaker is the representative for Polk Smith's editioned works from the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. Established by the artist himself, the foundation has actively sought to preserve and promote Polk Smith's art and legacy since his death at the age of ninety in 1996.

For further information, please contact gallery@seniorandshopmaker.com.

The exhibition features work from eighteen artists including painters, jewelry and clothing designers, mixed media and installation artists, prosthetic and designers. They address our human future in nature and our inevitable transformation, evolution, and decay.

About Pratt Institute: Pratt Institute is a global leader in higher education, preparing 4,700 undergraduate and graduate students for successful careers in art, design, architecture, information and digital innovation, and liberal arts and sciences. Founded in 1887, Pratt is a living laboratory of creativity with a historic, 25-acre campus in Brooklyn, as well as a signature building in Manhattan. Our esteemed faculty of accomplished professionals and scholars challenge talented students to transform their passion into meaningful expression and contribute to society as leaders in their fields. For more information, visit www.pratt.edu/news.

Petzel is pleased to announce the opening of a permanent bookstore at our Chelsea location.

The bookstore brings visibility to the wide-ranging publishing endeavors of the artists in the Petzel program. Inventory includes recent as well as rare exhibition catalogues, monographs, artist’s books, and catalogue raisonnés. Titles produced by the publishing imprint at Petzel, and in collaboration with world-renowned publishers, such as Koenig Books, Hatje Cantz, JRP|Ringier, and Leopard Press, will be for sale. Also available are publications related to Petzel artists produced by institutions such as The Stedelijk Museum, Aspen Museum of Art, Museum Brandhorst, and many others.

Regular distinguished artist book signings, readings, and curated conversations will be hosted at the bookstore.

Located at Petzel Gallery, 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Bookstore hours are Tuesday through Saturday from from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by artist, sculptor, architect, and all-around polymathic “Genius” (2010 MacArthur Fellowship recipient), Jorge Pardo. This is his ninth exhibition with the gallery and first painting show—but don’t expect oil on canvas.

Candid snapshots of Jorge Pardo in workaday situations—man-spreading in a chair, strolling down the street, posing in Brazilian swim trunks—taken by friends, family, studio assistants, as well as up-close-and-personal Selfies, are the foundation for these 15 new paintings. And then the metamorphosis begins, simultaneously upending what defines a painting and a self portrait. Amalgamating craftsmanship and computerized manipulation with a range of media, Pardo creates an intricate, hybridized fusion of painting and sculpture. The images are bastardized—blown-up, engraved, laser-cut, hand-painted and back-lit with LEDs, to produce, in some cases, vast ornamental objects. Tiers of milled, perforated wood and Plexiglas overlap and interact on a relief which dissipates and parodies both self and portrait. Transparency, light, and color add further layers of complexity to these works—when illuminated the shapes, patterns and subjects within the paintings alter. A larger transformation occurs when the works are hung from the ceiling; the paintings morph into seemingly weightless light-boxes.

Jorge Pardo’s self portraits—sourced from prosaic material, refined and abstracted by his practice—expand the artist’s exploration into questions of composition, forms of display and classification within this traditional genre. The paintings in Self Portraits double as sculptures, triple as ornaments, quadruple as lamps—forcing a reexamination of the everyday object.

Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM.

Using quotidian objects as the foundation for their work, Lyon and Bustin's practices similarly evoke the mixed sentiments found in domiciliary settings: equally comforting and melancholic, durable and decayed. Together they celebrate the agency and strength granted in self-actualization by means of owning aesthetic and sentimental environments, the ability to maintain, preserve and reinvent the container of personal experience. The works featured not only encompass time, memories and human sensation but also access a certainty of selfhood in the particularly gendered territory of the home.

Lyon and Bustin employ methodologies of the emotional labor owed to materials closely connected to shared biographies combined with the physical labor of thoughtful creation. Ashley Lyon’s sculptures are detailed replicas of objects inherently soft in nature with heightened tactile and wistful character; they are meticulously copied into ceramic material, converted into something solid yet easily damaged. During the meditative experience of looking at and delicately crafting these familiar possessions, the tenderness and warmth of home is embedded. Lyon’s duvets, mattresses and floor tiles expand the location of where corporal sensation remains, they oscillate between atemporal representations of everyday items and uncanny beings striving toward the realism found within the storytelling of their unique marks and textures.

Jane Bustin combines traditional and contemporary materials, exploring the dichotomy between their abstract minimalist composition and the sentimental qualities of ceramic, textiles and found objects. Concerned with deconstructing the formal components of abstraction, she considers the properties and arrangement of materials, extending the link between craft, concept and movement. Bustin likens her grandmother’s laundering, baking and crocheting routines to the type of diligence she applies as an artist; folding, flattening and rolling until the organic is contained. The pale tones, reflective surfaces and intuitive organization prompt a tenderness and familiarity reminiscent of a bedroom vanity, a micro space of solace within the home. The artists maneuver a relationship between the object’s ontology and their transformation into vehicles of psychological projection; a parallel to the work’s intimate development in the studio against their perceptive contextual availability in the gallery.

Modern Domestics asserts the complexity of emotional security found in the home and the histories amassed in objects of comfort, those of the life interior. The work affirms domesticity as a uniquely feminine domain, a beacon of safety and transcendence from the transgressions of modernity. Although aware of its unequivocal hybridity with fragility and temporality, it is deemed private, everlasting and manageable against the volatile anxieties of the external.

Chambers Fine Art is pleased to present ROADSIDE PICNIC, a group exhibition of Chinese artists living in New York, curated by Hiroshi Sunairi and Yixin (Sam) Gong.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a short science fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in 1971. The 1979 art film “Stalker,” directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers. Set in the indefinite future, the “Stalker” works as a guide who leads people through the ”Zone", an area in which the normal laws of reality do not apply. Touching upon themes of displacement and changing realities, the curators will present the work of 10 artists: Chang Yuchen, Lang Zhang, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, Tan Tian, Tiger Chengliang Cai, Tingying Ma (in collaboration with Tina Wang and Kang Kang), Wang Tuo, Yi Xin Tong, Wei Xiaoguang, and Weigang Song.

Compared to the practices of Chinese artists represented in much of the current Western art scene, these artists, educated in the United States, create works that defy the ‘exoticization’ of their Chinese-ness. Their use of diverse art mediums, including painting, video, film, installation, performance, dance, drawing, and sculpture are fused with personal, idiosyncratic, theoretical, formal, satirical, poetic and ineffable contents.

“As the title implies, ROADSIDE PICNIC is the food meant to be eaten on an excursion by the side of a road. Where does this road lead to within the New York art world, to a maturity of style and content back in China, or toward becoming the leading voices of contemporary discourse? ROADSIDE PICNIC is a celebration of the state in flux as our global world rattles anxiously and attentively”.
- Hiroshi Sunairi, Stalkert and Yixin (Sam) Gong, Bubble B.

About the curators:

Hiroshi Sunairi was born in Hiroshima in 1972. Dealing with issues of collective memory and the public sphere, he creates sculpture/installation and cinema on various contents.

Sunairi has exhibited internationally, and he teaches in the Art Department at New York University.
Yixin (Sam) Gong was born and raised in Xiamen, China, and is a curator and researcher based in New York City. He has worked on several non-profit institutions in China and Southeast Asia. Gong studies Art History at Rutgers University.

Combining representation and abstraction, Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings capture the frenetic pace of contemporary culture. Broaching subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history, her works eschew linear storytelling in lieu of disjointed narratives. The effect is information overload, balanced with a kind of spontaneous order, where time and space are compressed and identity is interchangeable. Her distinctively bold style harnesses the flux and simultaneity that has come to define life in the 21st century.

Through a bracing use of color and unapologetic scale, Abney’s canvases propose a new type of history painting, one grounded in the barrage of everyday events and funneled through the velocity of the internet.

Abney was born in Chicago and currently lives and works in New York. Her work is included in collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Rubell Family Collection, Bronx Museum, and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.

Abney’s first solo museum exhibition, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, curated by Marshall Price, Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, was presented earlier this year at the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina. It will travel to the Chicago Cultural Center (February 10–May 6, 2018) and then to Los Angeles, where it will be jointly presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum (September 23, 2018–January 20, 2019). The final venue for the exhibition is the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York (April 7–August 4, 2019). The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully-illustrated hardcover catalogue with critical essays by Price, as well as Jamillah James, curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Natalie Y. Moore, a South Side bureau reporter for Chicago Public Media, WBEZ; and Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke. The catalogue is distributed by Duke University Press and designed by Reneé Cagnina Haynes.

Nkosi Nkululeko has received fellowships from Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Poets House. He has performed for TEDxNewYork and the Aspen Ideas Festival, a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for both the 2016 Winter Tangerine Awards for Poetry and the 2016 Best of the Net anthology. His work is currently published in The Collagist, Third Coast, Pank, Apogee, VINYL, and more. Nkosi lives in Harlem, New York.

Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn based in Brooklyn. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire, and freedom. She is the author of the Drapetomania(Commune Editions, 2015) and Don't Let Them See Me Like This(Nightboat, 2018).

When two emerge at opposite ends of the forest at the same time they are in alignment. They are not the same, they are aligned. They are at the opposite ends of a line. The line is time or the line is geography or the line is a body or the line is a finger. Alignment is a reading series seeking to create relations, clashes, or comaraderies that would not otherwise have occasion. Two readers at different points. The difference is age is medium is location is race is gender is sexuality or the difference is a secret. Readers could be strangers, idols, or opponents. The difference creates a question. The difference creates a mistake. The difference creates alignment.

An opportunity to create something new, challenge their idea of medium, or unearth a piece from their own archive, Alignment welcomes experimentation by providing 30-45 minutes to each reader.

Curated by Adrienne Herr & LA Warman
Adrienne Herr is a poet and performer. She maintains multiple websites where she posts poetry, audio clips, and screenshots. She is the founder of POEM ELEMENTS, a by-donation poetry workshop aimed at fostering an open and supportive literary community. Adrienne has recently performed for Poetry 99, Cixous 72, Motto Books, ATM Gallery, and Poetic Research Bureau.
adriennes.site

LA Warman is a poet and performer. She is the founder of GLASS PRESS, a publisher of art and poetry on flash drives. Warman has had work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, Time-Based Art Festival, General Public Collective, Flying Object, and Open Engagement. She has chapbooks from Inpatient Press and After Hours Ltd. Warman is also the author of Whore Foods, a serialized erotic novella.
LAWarman.com

November 30th – December 23rd, 2017
NEW YORK, NY—October 3rd, 2017— Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Echoes, a group show of works that are manifestations of loss curated by Alyssa Alexander and Celeste Kaufman.

An echo, at its core, is a distant version of what it once was. A sound reverberates, then fades. It can be a haunting memory, or instill a sense of wonder. An echo can also be a reminiscence, a nod to something that came before it. The present echoes the past. It is not a perfect replication of it, but an acknowledgement of its heritage.

The works collected in this group show are echoes both in process and in concept. Their origins are transformed and concealed. The resulting piece appears to be its own entity, but still contains whispers of how it began. There is a loss of form, color, or imagery, but that does not detract from what remains. These artists are also investigating the loss of places, time, objects, and concepts as they create so that the work itself becomes an homage, an echo, to these distant sources.

Peter Hoffer’s landscapes at first appear to be traditional; serene and glossy representations of the world around us. However, upon stepping closer you discover that the paintings have drips and inconsistent marks, and the surfaces are scratched, cracked, and seared. He has manipulated them into different states of retrograde, as if they are antiquated works that have been abandoned and then uncovered. They carry a sense of nostalgia for both bygone times and the places that collect these kinds of memories, the attics and antique stores where you might stumble across an artifact akin to the one he has created.

Sarah Irvin’s ink series reflects the shifting nature of memory, the evolution of language on an individual and societal level, and how the dependability of both can be lost over time. The series was initially inspired by her grandfather’s loss of language due to Alzheimer’s disease, but developed further as she began to use the limited language skills of her baby daughter as a starting point, shifting her focus from the end of our relationship with words to the beginning. She begins with ink and non-absorbent Yupo paper, writing words in expressive cursive, then destroys those marks with squeegees, pulling the ink across the paper to form rich, dynamic new images. Remnants of the words sometimes remain visible, but their meaning can’t be deciphered.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ work is deceptively minimalist. A depth is revealed beyond the initial perception of monochromatic surfaces that’s built up through layers of rich color. Jones is not creating white paintings; he is pushing colors to their very limits, to the moment just before they become white. The under-painting peeks through here and there, giving a glimpse to the shades and textures that construct the final work. It’s because of these hidden features that Jones considers himself something of a landscape painter, inspired by the grit and entropy of his urban surroundings. He draws qualities from the peeling layers of paint on concrete walls, the scratches left behind by skateboards on handrails, the flecks of metal that shine through as surfaces are eroded over time. The surfaces of his paintings are then not only the ghosts of the colors underneath, but of the largely abandoned industrial landscape.

Ryan Sarah Murphy constructs reliefs from discarded cardboard. Finding her materials out on the street or in the remnants of her own consumerism, she removes any identifying branding, text, or images and uses what’s left without painting or treating them. Murphy allows what’s left to guide her, using its energy and unknown history to shape her decisions as she assembles them into forms that meet at the intersection of abstraction and architectural elements, suggesting a strange terrain seen from an aerial view. The gritty remnants of an urban landscape are revived as bold structures with a bright, limited palette and an alluring tactile nature; an unexpected iteration of our society’s odds and ends.

Dana Oldfather begins her paintings by blocking in a scene from her Midwestern domestic life; the discomfort she feels when caught in traditional roles for women and notions of femininity, the isolation and loneliness of motherhood, the fragility of comfort and happiness. Then, she obliterates that imagery through layers of ink, spray paint, acrylic, and oil paints. The narrative is masked by frenetic mark making that possesses a pulsing energy and bittersweet beauty. However, Oldfather does not seek to hide her interior life. She considers the chaos of her abstraction to be an honest addition to it.

Frank Jones was an elusive figure with a poignant, rather obscure biography. Born circa 1900 in Clarksville, Texas—a city still painfully segregated after the Civil War’s Reconstruction Era decades—he was abandoned by his parents as an infant and raised by an aunt in a religious, profoundly superstitious household where the legacy of slavery still held sway. Henry Ray Clark was born in Bartlett, Texas in 1936 and moved to Houston with his family during the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression. Both artists lived in the Huntsville State Prison at different times, creating powerful and distinct bodies of work that quickly transcended its walls.
As a child, Jones was apparently told that his left eye was hooded at birth with a caul (part of the amniotic membrane), a singularity interpreted in African American lore as a kind of reverse invisibility cloak; endowing those born this way with supernatural insight into the world of spirits. Fittingly, he claimed to have seen ghosts (or “haints”) and haunted objects since he was a young boy. He never received formal education, hence remained essentially illiterate, and was incarcerated three times between 1941 and 1964, in each case for crimes (rape, theft, homicide) in which he contended full innocence. The last time, he was sentenced to life in prison as a parole infringer and began drawing shortly after. Jones’s initial pictures were made with foraged materials: blue and red pencils used by prison staff and scrap paper. His palette stayed consistently narrow: scarlet or cardinal reds in combination with azure or navy blues—the colors of fire and smoke, as he described them—seldom branching out to shades of green and orange. The artist’s sole subjects were his signature “devil houses,” tiered, thoroughly compartmentalized structures where he placed and trapped the spirits that spooked him.
Though not preoccupied with perspective, Jones imbued his constructions with plasticity by tethering all outlines with a patterned overlay, frequently double sided, where prickly thorn and capsule-like forms repeatedly intermingle in different sequences, switching colors and accents like flickering lights. Generally, the simpler arrangements are sparingly populated (like theater settings waiting for the action to happen) and have a weightier presence on the picture plane. The more intricate compositions tend to look spectral, almost buoyant, with strategic accents signaling energy fields and spotlights. Because Jones’s devils are of the exact visual matter of the frameworks in which they dwell—playing a camouflage, hide-and-seek game on the viewer—his works often seem to depict a single primitive monster with many appendages, like entries in a medieval bestiary. The clever tenants of the houses morph into different shapes approaching birds, bats, fish, dragonflies, crustaceans, cacti, air plants, and the mysterious creatures found deep within forests or seas—inhabitants of both reality and myth. Most have the classic pair of head-horns, usually several more pocking out elsewhere, and those given a face are always smiling widely; some even mimic architectural elements, balancing on the roof like gargoyles or whirligigs, posing at the foot like heraldic statues, or taking the shape of clocks and thus jinxing time itself.
***
Clark dropped out of school at 14 and was educated instead, by an uncle so inclined, in the ways of gamblers, thugs, and pimps. Drawn to easy money and the thrill of a life beyond the law, he was a street maverick according to his own assessment; strolling through life with his unusual blue eyes and the noted epithet “The Magnificent Pretty Boy.” In 1977, after a string of drug-dealing convictions, he was sentenced, under the “Three Strikes” Law (implemented to keep recurring offenders separate from the community) to serve 25 years in prison for assaulting a man with a deadly weapon in a betting feud. He began to draw in a prison arts program and eventually won a prize in the one-day “Texas Department of Corrections Art Show,” the same event and award that had launched Jones’s career years prior.
Clark’s works are made with pens and markers on manila envelopes. He typically portrays a single main character in the center (an extraterrestrial being, esoteric demi-god, or allegorical figure) like an insect trapped in amber, regularly within a solid field of color peppered with a few emblems of interplanetary whim: a sun, small rocket ships, swooshes, twinkles, and stars. Beyond this nucleus, there’s always a kaleidoscopic framework that occupies most of the composition. In the suite of drawings presented as part of “INSIDERS,” Clark starts off from a chestnut or reddish-brown base that mingles intricately with structural and free-forming segments of gold, ochre, or mustard yellows—interlacing vivid or opaque greens, reds, blues, and occasional weavings of hot pink, violet, and magenta. The artist bends line and color into an overall effect of controlled asymmetry, fluidly integrating organic shapes, shadings, or abstract scripts and flourishes that resemble numbers and notation. This visual poetics implies an urgency to obliterate any vestige of untouched surface, a case of horror vacui in some ways reminiscent of Adolf Wölfli. In fact, Clark’s works are often so saturated with ink that they became furrowed with added texture.
Embedded in these compact layouts is usually a short declaratory introduction, through which the subject depicted introduces its name and provenance: “I Am Checo from the Planet Rat,” or “I Am Gator from the Planet Weird” and such. This cast of characters has the aura of a magnified fortune-telling deck of cards; at times solemn and cryptic, at times witty. Evident in these declarations is the unfettered confidence of a man who despite being physically captive, re-asserted himself as the autocrat in worlds of his own invention. “I tell them every night when I go to bed that I travel; I get on my little spaceship … all these places that I be putting on these papers and things, I go to them places at night,” said Clark in an interview with his patron William Steen—an unabridged narrative where the artist swiftly turns his life story into a rebirth saga. This ease with language and storytelling stands in stark contrast next to Jones’s only two inscriptions: his prisoner’s ID number (114591) and in some cases his name, or variations thereof—markings that strike less like signatures and more like spells, cast to moor an artist dispossessed by his nightmares back to himself.
“INSIDERS” points to the central paradox of “Outsider” art, whereby exclusion magically becomes exclusivity—a mystifying, ambiguous circumstance in a society of discrimination and privilege. Jones died of cirrhosis, still behind bars, in 1969. Clark died in 2006, after he was shot by trespassers who broke into his home, only five years after he had been released from prison.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Goudou Goudou, an exhibition of mixed media work by Paul Gardère. This will be the second solo show of his work at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, December 7, 6-8pm.

Paul Gardère (1944-2011), a Haitian-American artist of mixed racial heritage was a versatile and complex artist whose work spoke a multilayered language that is at once personal and full of thoughtful inclusion. An astute observer of the world around him, his rich and varied cultural experience was integrated into a critical framework that engaged with issues of history, identity and authenticity. However, he remained philosophically and stylistically an internationalist whose work reflected his integrative approach to life and art. The visual resonance in his work is undeniable, attesting to his ability to seamlessly fuse ancient and modern concepts and aesthetics with nimble intelligence and zestful audacity that confronts tradition while encouraging us to embrace a more expansive definition of modernism.

Goudou Goudou is a selection of Gardère’s final series before his death, produced in the aftermath of the earthquake on January 12, 2010 in Haiti. These mixed media works offer a visceral peek into the artist’s personal response to the disaster. Mud relief and carved wood come together with haunted figures and Kreyol text to emphasize the nature, experience and survival of “goudou goudou” – the Kreyol term for the earthquake, the syllables of which evoke the sound of the shaking earth. This body of work is strong, deeply meditative and dense with nuances that expertly exploit the ambiguities arising between darkness and radiance; abstraction and figuration as well as the intriguing play between formal intention and narrative potential. His use of a wide range of materials, styles, and techniques evince a longstanding commitment to cross-cultural hybridization as well as extracting textured patterns, images and symbols from his immediate environment. There is no hierarchy of images – the path of visual exploration for each composition is of our own choosing, and the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a language system. For the artist, the body remains a potent vehicle for the exploration of the human condition in a period of great turmoil, bearing witness to trauma through a visual narration that pays tribute to the strength of a people struggling to survive and move forward.

Paul Gardère was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he was raised and educated in a privileged environment before coming to New York at the age of fourteen. He sought art education as a teenager at the Art Students League, later obtaining a B.A at Cooper Union and an MFA at Hunter College, New York. He has exhibited extensively both in the U.S and in his homeland. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Jersey City Museum, NJ; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa; Le Centre d’Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; New Orleans Museum of Art as well as in the Libraries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT and the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

THE LAST BREATH IN PAUL GARDÈRE’S LAST WORKS

The furtive presences, evocative shadows or symbolic spirits that seem to haunt the personas and worlds that Paul Gardère depicts in the last works he completed before he passed away on September 2, 2011, have generally been in one form or another a constant in his art. It’s through the pivotal role of such beings that viewers at times might find some clue on how to process or meditate on the deadlocked or devastating encounters between the contrasting socio-cultural and political forces stemming from colonialism and its legacy, the core subject of the artist’s oeuvre. But in past works, Gardère tends to present such supposed agents as mere witnesses more or less objective observers whose roles seem to be to record and apprehend for posterity the ineffable violence and desolation that result from such encounters. They don’t seem disposed to waste their breath on or editorialize about what they observe. But in Gardère’s last works this is no longer the case: He allows his conjured spirits to dictate or at least set the tone for his staged dramas.

This is a significant shift for an artist who, at least to some extent and strategically, may have marooned, as it were, his attitude toward his subject. The last works are a revelatory tipping point wherein Gardère chooses sides or, in a sense, comes home. And this of course is not so much a physical homecoming, or even a space in which to hone a more desirable sense of national identity. It’s a philosophic and psychic realization that induces him finally to commit his last breath, so to say, as a supplement to that of the shadowy presences which, in various forms, he has long incorporated in his art. As seen also in the larger pieces among his last works, these invented spirits include the mysterious mud-encrusted hybrid creatures that seem to transcend time and space. They are also presented as emblems of various Vodou lwa (or spirits), such as the ubiquitous Gédé (or short) crosses representing Bawon Samdi, the leading spirit of death and procreation. In some of Gardère’s smaller pieces, which may very well be fragments planned for larger works—but which nonetheless could stand alone—he presents close-up portraits of such mud figures and, at times, reduces their presence to just their cracked lips.

Gardère’s customary distance from his subjects is evident in most of the works he presented in a large solo exhibition at the Jersey City Museum in 1999. It’s worthwhile to examine from this show just one piece, “Self-Portrait with Hector Hyppolite” (1998). For this is a picture that telegraphs the dynamic that has led to Gardère’s eventual homecoming, and it exemplifies quite well the previous distance and objective tone he maintains toward his subjects. Appended on the picture’s upper right side on a large field of magenta glitter is a large reproduction in faded colors of Hyppolite’s iconic self-portrait in white jacket and hat and an unknotted pink tie that hangs flat from the white collars of his shirt. (The veteran primitif art-besotted and expressionist artist Emmanuel Merisier would sometimes sport his tie in a similar manner when he roamed New York City’s galleries and museums). Abutting the lower left edge of the picture is Gardère’s own well groomed black and white self-portrait, with a glint in his eyes. His carefully detailed image shows just the frontal part of his face, making his likeness look like a death mask which, by means of the temples of his eyeglasses, he hooks up behind the ears and over the face of who evidently looks like a Basquiat persona, presented as a hipster with a loose pink tie and a crown of spiky budding dreads. In all, one might be tempted to infer that the subtext of the work has to do with a certain trinity that Gardère is trying to establish among three artists of various Haitian backgrounds.

But the tenor of “Self-Portrait with Hyppolite” is such that Gardère seems hardly interested in such a romanticized, far-fetched alliance—a comradeship he himself feigns to initiate but that he actually proffers more as a bait to the reflexive nationalists among his viewers. (Years ago, the susceptible Merisier was for a long time quite miffed after he tried to reach out to Gardère who, allegedly, didn’t bother to give him the time of day). The entire work is a sort of tragicomic masquerade about three mismatched artists of quite different temperaments and leanings: Hyppolite, brilliant as he was as an erstwhile Vodou priest turned artist, presents himself as a haloed elect—or as a man-about-town who managed to transcend a life of illiteracy and penury to end up with a meteoric, three-year career that to this day virtually no one even among his would-be champions fully understands or appreciates since, among other vexing problems, most of his works are presumably scattered and, thus, practically unaccounted for. Basquiat, who after his trying days in Washington Square Park and the streets of the East Village, transformed himself into a “flyboy in the buttermilk,” a wunderkind whose often brilliant art and tragically short career have hardly been parsed to the extent that they’ve been exploited or oversold.

The upshot in “Self-Portrait with Hyppolite” is that Gardère negates or keeps at a cool distance all but the masquerade that he presents: It’s as if simply to mimic his two prematurely dead predecessors he, too, were pretending to dress up for a part, as if to crash a big art world party by faking and muscling his way through its gatekeepers, just as he fakes or diligently copies his way through the impressionist garden landscape he attaches under the lower right side of the work. Most importantly, even the masked, partly camouflaged genderless spirit in black glitter that Gardère juxtaposes next to his rendition of the impressionist garden seems oblivious to his attempted permutations of his identity in the picture. Still and expressionless, it pretends not to witness anything—except that its mien is that of a trickster, protean type. As such, it’s Gardère’s self-effacing co-conspirator, so to say—the pivotal entity that, in spite of its aloof presence, opens up to viewers the paths to the painting’s various layers of meaning. Gardère himself, pretending to present the entire picture as if in the socially conscious mode of some of the representational modernists he might have studied with as an undergraduate at Cooper Union, paradoxically maintains, perhaps like one of the unflappable minimalists-conceptualists who might have mentored him in graduate school, a marked and sustained distance from his subject.

But in his last works, Gardère chooses sides or also comes home in another sense—as a Haitian artist. This is not to suggest, however, that his art practice or aesthetic attitude is similar to or in sync with most of those of his compatriots. For one thing, he may very well be the first Haitian-born artist to have received extensive formal art training at the university level, leading to his earning an M.A. from Hunter College in 1972. More importantly perhaps, he had given himself a sustained and thorough grounding in the art of the original Haitian primitifs from the late-forties and fifties. On those two fronts alone, his is a postmodern sensibility, one that supersedes the modernist variants produced by, say, Hector Hyppolite and Rigaud Benoit, to cite just two artists whose art Gardère has prominently incorporated in his work. Moreover, in the deliberate way in which he likes to compose his elliptical pictures so as to force or wring out from them—not simply unforeseen—but significantly worthwhile or revelatory meanings, he is more in line with the contrarian Hervé Télémaque, who settled in Paris in 1961. Gardère might have unknowingly run into him when he, fresh from Haiti, studied at the Arts Students’ League in 1960-61. Nevertheless, much more so than in Télémaque—one might get a clear indication of this need to be seen through the lens of Haitian art in much of Gardère’s earlier works—arguably, for instance, in the transparently earnest way he goes about—not just appropriating—but copying both old and modern European masters—as a colonial subject might consciously mimic a colonial tongue so as to sample alternate ways of generating meanings for himself and his audience. Or more obviously, besides his use of Vodou imagery and symbols, one could see Haitian art in Gardère practice in his constant use of glitter, a “low” material that brings to mind the look of Vodou flags.

Gardère has come home in his last works and eliminated the calculated distance from his subject for other pressing reasons. For instance, far from being about the art world and his place or identity in it, and far from his usual concerns with the old and more recent encounters in the history of colonialism and its legacy, his subject matter in the last months and weeks of his life has become more eminent and personal. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti and, as devastating, death or its premonition in the midst of love have precipitated the shift in his final disposition. In a “ménage a trois” work—words inscribed on the painting’s surface—he presents two lovers embracing with the somewhat indistinguishable words Lanmou ak Lanmò (love and death) written under them. (Gardère‘s wife of forty-two years, Marcia, had gotten seriously ill and passed away a few weeks before he did). In a painting about the earthquake, over which he writes “goudou goudou”, the onomatopoeic Haitian word for the fearsome sound of the calamity that took the lives of some two-to three-hundred thousand victims, the artist prominently represents a dark mysterious being with what look like a whip in hand and a bugle in its mouth—as if to galvanize and lend succor to a wounded and dazed upside down figure. The cutoff Gédécross in the left panel of the picture adds to the idea that the dark figure made out of mud—with a touch of glitter on its head—may very well be a manifestation of Bawon Samdi, who sees through time or through life and death.

Gardère dispenses with his customary distance in another of his last paintings, which bears the Haitian word “katastròf" (catastrophe) over much of its surface. Here, with Bawon’s top hat crowning its head, the presumed sufferer or earthquake victim being addressed seems to be communing with the conjured spirit which Gardère subtly presents in the picture with its index finger piercing as if through the threshold between the world of les invisibles (the invisibles ones or spirits) and that of the living. Crucially—and despite the details of the supposed mass graves being dug up by backhoes shown toward the bottom edge of the picturethe artist seems to throw in his lot with the probability of transcending death. This conscious siding with life—and thus, on Gardère’s part, with Bawon—is symbolized by the numerous pwen (power points or stores of energy) in the form of light dots or small circles that he often dispenses over the surface of his work.

That Gardère has come home in his last worksand hardly shows any significant signs of wanting to return to the approach that distanced him from his subjects—and that have also led him to his final stanceis also evident in some of what may or may not be fragments conceived for other mixed-media paintings he was planning. Among them is the torso of a trickster-like figure made out of mud as if it hails from Bawon’s realm. Sporting spectacles and what look like optical instruments, he points an accusatory or cautionary finger. And as if to commit himself even further in his new disposition, Gardère depicts in another supposed fragment, which may well be a complete work in itself, the profile of a mud figure with what looks like wings on its back. But, conspicuous as it is, though this primordial hybrid figure appears self-contained and visibly inactive, it’s plausible that it’s Gardère himself who has directly enabled its cast shadow to gesticulate with an arm, especially since the figure itself does not show or even possess an arm. It’s also Gardère himself who seems to have amplified its inaudible speech—as if the shadow in his art, as well as the invented spirit that inhabits it, finally and once and for all, were his mouthpiece.

Tyler Rollins Fine Art is pleased to present Wild State of Mind, a solo exhibition of new works by Ronald Ventura, taking place at our gallery in New York City from October 26 – December 22, 2017.

Born in 1973 in Manila, the Philippines, where he continues to live and work, Ventura ranks as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation in Southeast Asia. Over the past twenty years, his dynamically evolving oeuvre has exhibited an eclectic range of iconography and a wide variety of themes and subjects, taking formal risks that push the boundaries of image-making. The exhibition probes the intersections between reality and fiction, madness and sanity, logic and instinct, breaking down the dualities that impose a sharp divide between humans and wild animals. Ventura draws from contemporary social practices and culture, placing his hybrid creatures in scenes of merrymaking, parading, brawling, or playing sports – contexts that elicit extreme emotions but are very much part of our lived realities today. He incorporates often ominous imagery and symbols, ranging from traffic warning signs to firearms, that appear in a new kind of urban wilderness that is the contemporary counterpart to the sinister, mysterious forests of age-old legends and fairy tales.

Ventura presented his first US solo exhibition, Metaphysics of Skin, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2009, followed by A Thousand Islands in 2011 and E.R. (Endless Resurrection) in 2014. A major solo exhibition of his work, Project: Finding Home, took place in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, while in 2017 the Metropolitan Museum, Manila, presented another solo exhibition, Shadow Forest: Encounters and Explorations. Concurrently with Wild State of Mind, Ventura’s work is featured in Out of Sight! Art of the Senses at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA. Other museum exhibitions of note include: Ronald Ventura: Big and Small, Ayala Museum, Makati City, the Philippines (2015); Bulul, Ronald Ventura and the traditional art of the Philippines, Museo delle Culture, Lugano, Switzerland (2014); Watching the Watchmen, Vargas Museum, Manila, the Philippines (2012); Recyclables, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2012); Surreal Versus Surrealism in Contemporary Art, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2011); A Duad in Play, ICA Gallery, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore (2010); Mapping the Corporeal, National University of Singapore Museum (2008). He was a participating artist in the Prague Biennale (2009) and the Nanjing Biennial (2010).

RUBY RUMIÉ: WEAVING STREETS, will be on view at Nohra Haime Gallery from November 16th to January 6th. This major exhibition will include a series of photographs, a video, a poster, and five volumes on Cartagena’s ambulant street vendors.

This new body of work was born from a chance encounter between the artist, Ruby Rumié, and Dominga Torres Tehran, a woman who for more than 45 years has walked the city streets selling fish. Dominga caught the attention of the artist for her unique and natural beauty. For nearly half a century this woman worked unnoticed, but at that moment, she completely captivated Rumié.

Weaving Streets is an attempt to rescue women like Dominga from oblivion and invisibility - women who have spent valuable years of their lives as ambulant street vendors, permanently wandering the neighborhoods of the city. Aptly named, “Weaving Streets” references the phrase used by grandmothers to describe those who walked the city streets often.

Rumié’s goal is to present new views on the vendors and their environment. The viewer’s encounter with these women will be different for the exhibition – it will be special. Viewers will see for the first time what has always been there, like running a thin veil between the visible and the invisible, a veil of old and constant stereotypes that keep us numb, or blind, so we ignore the marvelous and different realities.

“Problems such as gender violence, gentrification, social barriers and discrimination constitute a constant concern which I attempt to uncover through my work, by means of large installations where I use repetition as a platform for protest; bodies as objects of mass consumption that reveal the disappearance of our intangible heritage, and photographs to suggest the enigma of social stratification, all of these intend to stimulate reflection, playfulness, visual pleasure, emotion and inquiry” explains Rumié.

Rumié condenses the collected material into a Corpus, a historical archival manner, comprised of five volumes that unfold spatially in the gallery. Photo albums picturing each participant, stamp albums paying tribute to them, and a video of a ceremony held in their honor will frame the gallery space so that the images collectively transform into a fight against death and oblivion, thus becoming a legacy and memory to be heard by generations to come.

Born in Cartagena de Indias, Ruby Rumié studied in the School of Fine Arts of Cartagena de Indias. She has held major exhibitions in Colombia: Bogotá, Barranquilla, Cartagena; Santiago de Chile; Miami; New York; Washington D.C.; Rouen; Paris. Rumié participated in the international section of the First Biennial of Contemporary Art, Cartagena de Indias, and was recently granted a scholarship by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, where she completed the last stage of the Weaving Streets project, during a residency of four weeks. She currently lives and works in Cartagena, Colombia.

DATES: November 16, 2017 – January 6, 2018
RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST: Wednesday, November 15 from 6 – 8 p.m.
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Leslie Garrett at gallery@nohrahaimegallery.com or 212-888-3550

NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of major works by Michael Hurson (1941-2007). Hurson, who exhibited with the gallery from the mid-1970s until his untimely death, was an artist whose drawings, paintings, sculptures and texts constantly mirrored his personal life. He embraced his surroundings; Hurson painted and drew the people and objects around him. The exhibition will be on view at 521 West 21st Street from November 30th through December 22nd, 2017. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on Thursday, November 30th.